Is Method Acting Destroying Actors?

James Franco’s Op-Ed in the Times—in which he speculates whether some strange recent actions by Shia LaBeouf may be “intended as a piece of performance art, one in which a young man in a very public profession tries to reclaim his public persona”—is worthwhile and timely. Franco discusses the conflicts between the art of acting and the celebrity that results from success as an actor. He writes of any famous artist’s possible “distance between his true self and his public persona,” but distinguishes the pathos of the actor in terms of the extent of fame and relative lack of control over the artistic product itself. In addition to LaBeouf, he cites two other actors who willfully defied public expectations in quest of control: Marlon Brando and Joaquin Phoenix.

But the elephant in the room is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. In a memorial post, I mentioned the torment that’s revealed in his art. I think that it’s a variety of artistic torment that arises from the modern art of acting, of exactly the sort that Franco cites—and it’s not solely a matter of coping with fame. Here, for instance, is a moment from “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” the portrait of the octogenarian artist that opens today. Stritch is a first-rank wit, and the movie bristles with her exuberant yet vulnerable inventiveness, but the best lines in the film belongs to George C. Wolfe, who directed her one-woman show “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” from 2002:

I think there’s that pursuit to get at the thing that is underneath the thing that will illuminate a moment. That pursuit can produce madness, can produce a kind of irascibility, a kind of narcissism, but that’s what drives her.

There’s something about modern-day acting—the style that is famously associated with Lee Strasberg’s Method and that gained currency from his Actors Studio and its offshoots—that inclines toward deformations of character. That modern school, which links emotional moments from a performer’s own life to that of a character, and which conceives characters in terms of complete and filled-out lives that actors imagine and inhabit, asks too much of performers. Here’s how Franco describes it:

Actors have been lashing out against their profession and its grip on their public images since at least Marlon Brando. Brando’s performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn’t seem to be “performing,” in the sense that he wasn’t putting something on as much as he was being

Franco’s description of the style is, I think, accurate; his diagnosis of its connection to Brando’s public image is beside the point. An actor’s attempted excavation of her own deepest and harshest experiences to lend them to characters adds a dimension of self-revelation (even if only to oneself), of wounds reopened and memories relived, that would make for agony in therapy. On the other hand, the effort to conceive a character as a filled-out person, with a lifetime of backstory and biographical details, becomes a submergence into another (albeit fictitious) life, an abnegation of a nearly monastic stringency. In the effort to make emotions true, to model performance on the plausible actions of life offstage or offscreen, the modern actor is often both too much and too little herself.

Compare Brando with several of his noted predecessors, such as Cary Grant or Robert Mitchum, who seem not to become the roles they play but to turn the characters into versions of themselves. Their roles aren’t put-ons, but they do put them on: they don their roles like costumes while continuing, manifestly and even brazenly, to be—themselves. Not that actors in the early-studio era didn’t live strange or even riotous lives, but the reason was altogether different: it’s precisely because of the way their private lives flowed into their onscreen personae.

Here’s D. W. Griffith, in a 1925 interview (by, of all people, Djuna Barnes) on the subject of becoming an actress even after the first blush of ingénue charm is gone: “No woman is ever too old…. No woman is ever too experienced; she must not be afraid to live and to live dangerously, for it all counts to the good in pictures.” The private extravagances and excesses, the “experience” that in Griffith’s day came with a whiff of immorality, made the actor’s life seem bigger, grander, wilder, more exciting than that of the viewer—and that expanded emotional spectrum was more than a source of the actor’s imaginative sympathy for a wide range of characters; it was the very life force with which the actor invested the character.

The allure of the classic actor is, essentially, sex. The classic stars’ exotic, sybaritic life is part of their charm. Mitchum was, in effect, wilder than his characters; he endowed them with his own fury for life. The actor herself inflated roles to her own bigger-than-life dimensions. Now, in the post-Method age, actors seem expected to inflate or stretch or shrink or compress themselves to fit the character.

The actor’s sense of a lack of control, however, is another story altogether. The most poignant thing about acting in movies is the mediation of the camera. I wrote about this a few years ago: in theatre, an actor gives; in movies, the actor is taken from. Many of the great movie actors were minor, failed, or natural stage actors, or not actors at all (e.g., John Wayne); they became stars through the force of personality, of charisma, not through any studied technique. Some actors cultivate technique because it’s the aspect of performance that they can control—even if it’s not the part of their performance that the camera loves, and to which they owe their success. Other actors, frustrated by their lack of control, turn to politics or other outside ventures on which they can leave the marks they choose. Some, of course, become directors (and some become great ones).

Hoffman had a fury for acting and a virtuoso technique that he yoked, brilliantly, to it. He found his characters’ passions within himself, took their passions upon himself, and then created, with an uncanny gift for impersonation, a set of gestures and inflections that embodied them. But that supreme artifice became, in turn, a block to the expression of passion, and to make it real he dug deeper and burned brighter—and, then, found the gestures to show it. The connection of his inner life and outer skill generated a sort of emotional short circuit that overheated him terrifyingly, resulting in the justly admired intensity that he brought to every role—which was also, however, a sign of an actor giving more of himself, moment by moment, than an actor should ever be called upon, or need, to give.

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The sublimity of movie acting, the distinctive art of movie acting, is summed up in one of the greatest lines of dialogue in movie history, spoken by Lauren Bacall, a nonactress and model who, with little training, was recruited at the age of nineteen by Howard Hawks to play a starring role alongside Humphrey Bogart, in “To Have and Have Not”:

You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle.

The greatest movie actors don’t have to say or do anything, though a little trick at the right moment doesn’t hurt. They’re fascinating and emotion-filled in repose, and their action contains an ineffable core of stillness, a sort of inner mask that binds all expressions to an ideal perfection of the actor’s own exemplary persona. And, for those whose own theatrical styles are inescapably a part of their nature, there’s a special kind of role in which they surpass themselves and prove their superiority: the character who is himself a self-conscious and self-transforming performer. I’m thinking, for instance, of Hoffman in “The Master”; Bette Davis in “All About Eve”; and Brando in “Last Tango in Paris” and, even more, in “Meet Marlon Brando,” Albert and David Maysles’s 1965 documentary about him (or, rather, about his narrow set of encounters during a New York press junket).

For Brando, the Maysles brothers created a special genre—in effect, the one-man show, of a sort that Shirley Clarke, soon thereafter, would develop with even greater concentration for her friend Jason Holliday in “Portrait of Jason.” Here’s George C. Wolfe again, from the documentary about Elaine Stritch:

I remember, on the opening night of “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” George Grizzard came up to me and said, “Thanks for creating a vehicle that allows no other actors to get in the way of Elaine Stritch’s love relationship with an audience.”

The revelation of great acting is a matter of ideas—of cinematic and theatrical form—as is the discovery of good acting where it might be least expected. There are no bad actors, there are only bad directors.